Reliability and speed of communications in a wireless network is increasingly crucial to serve growing user demands. This necessitates increasing constant improvements in technology.
Wireless communications systems can be deployed using a single transmit and a single receive antenna. The wireless channel distorts and adds other impairments to the received signal. These include additive noise, interference, time selective, frequency selective and space selective fading. Fading implies that the signal can be at different level at different antennas, or frequency or time. It is therefore important to transmit and or receive multiple replicas of the signal from multiple dimensions in space, frequency or time to increase the overall link reliability. This approach is known as diversity and is an important technique to assure reliable wireless communication over fading channels. Space diversity is obtained by using multiple antennas in the transmitter and/or in the receiver. When a multiple transmitter-receiver antenna system is deployed, not only can the reliability be improved but also the data rate can be enhanced.
Typically digital modulation of transmitted data is used. Example of such modulation schemes include M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), M-ary phase shift keying (PSK) etc. Multiple access schemes are also employed to support multiple users. Multiple access schemes include code division multiple access (CDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) and orthogonal frequency division modulation access (OFDMA) are employed. Multiple antenna schemes can be used with any modulation and multiple access scheme.
The data to be transmitted (e.g., the information bits) are encoded with a chosen coding scheme to generate coded bits. With multiple transmit antennas, coding includes the space dimension along with time or frequency dimensions and are specific to the number of transmit and receive antennas. The encoding scheme determines the diversity that can be captured, the transmission rate, and the decoding complexity at the receiver. The transmission rate refers to the average number of complex symbols that can be transmitted in one time slot or frequency bin. Transmission rate two requires at least 2 transmit and 2 receive antennas. A configuration with multiple transmit and receive antennas is known as MIMO (multiple input-multiple output).
Though different MIMO encoding schemes are available, these schemes do not simultaneously support transmission rate two, low complexity decoding at the receiver, maximum transmit diversity performance, and are not capable of being used with more than two transmit antennas. For example U.S. Pat. No. 6,185,258 describes the Alamouti code, a code which is only a rate one scheme and applicable to two transmit antennas only. Other schemes do not offer maximum diversity or low complexity decoding.
Since wireless systems sometimes operate with more than two (2) transmit antennas, there is a need to develop signal encoding schemes for a MIMO system with more than 2 transmit antennas, where the encoding schemes further support a transmission rate of two complex symbols per time slot or frequency bin, and also offers maximum diversity as well as low complexity decoding.